Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from someone who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
As hard drive manufacturers look for new ways to cram more data in less space, we see innovations, but we also see new problems for data recovery. Some of the recent Western Digital SMR hard drives have incorporated new methods of translation to handle shingled magnetic recording (SMR). For an introduction, you can read this […]
Sandforce based SSD devices are notorious for failure and for being difficult, if not impossible, to recover. One type of Sandforce based SSD device failure is rumored to only be recoverable by a few data recovery labs across the globe, and at great expense. At Blizzard, we have discovered that some Sandforce based SSD drives […]
For today’s case we have a 3TB Western Digital model WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 with four platters and eight heads. It’s not uncommon to get portable hard disk drives that have been dropped or suffered some type of impact. In this case we have a full size hard drive that has suffered some type of impact and left […]
In this case, we received a 16GB PNY SD-HC camera card for photo recovery. The owner was not aware of any damage and thought the device had just stopped working. Unfortunately, there were still about 1,900 hi-res photos on the card that had not been copied yet. To start this case, we removed the plastic […]
This week’s data recovery case of note is a 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001. This model Seagate is notorious for failure so it really didn’t need an extra push over the cliff, but it got one. When we received this customer’s drive it had good padding, but the top cover was not on the HDD, it was […]
SSD data recovery presents some new challenges for data recovery labs. It requires new training, techniques, and tools. One controller type stands out as notorious in the DR world, it’s known as “SandForce”. To this day support has still not been added to the top SSD data recovery tool. For some Sandforce SSD failures there […]
This is just a partial list, by family name and number, of some of the Seagate hard drive models we have seen in our data recovery lab. A B C D G H J K L M P R S T V W Y Angsana 5400 – 76 ST500LT032-1E9142 Bacall – 59 ST1000VM002-1CT162 ST1000VM002-1ET162 ST1000VM002-9ZL162 […]
This is just a partial list, by family, of some of the Western Digital hard drive models we have seen in our data recovery lab. A B C D E F G H J K L M O P R S T V Z Apollo WD40EMRX-82UZ0N0 WD40EZRZ-00GXCB0 WD40EZRZ-22GXCB0 Aquarius WD1000BEVS-00LAT0 WD1000BEVS-22LAT0 Aries WD1600BEVS-00RST0 WD1600BEVS-22RST0 WD1600BEVS-75RST0 […]
At Blizzard Data Recovery we see a lot of 2.5″ laptop hard drives where the laptop suffered a fall or impact. Tip: don’t get mad at the internet and throw your laptop or bang on the keyboard 🙂 In some cases the laptop fails to boot and it ends up going to a computer repair […]